In this paper Puar historically situates the most current intersectional flavors of the day, “trans” and “disabled,” through their emergence as the latest newcomers to the intersectional fray. She looks at how their parallel yet rarely intersecting epistemological constructs—both come into being, or becoming, in the early 90s in the academy as well as in broader political terms and movements—require exceptionalizing both the trans body and the disabled body in order to convert the debility of a non-normative body into a form of social and cultural capacity, whether located in state recognition, identity politic formations, market economies, the medical industrial complex, or subject positioning.

Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, Oxford Rd, University of Manchester. Sponsored by EAC, SEXGEN and Pride. Followed by wine reception at Contact Theatre.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European cartographers and anatomists developed novel strategies for representing the diversity of human bodies in their atlases of the world and its inhabitants. Tracking their implicit taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and class, Valerie Traub speculates on the effects of their strategies on the historical emergence of the concept of “the normal.”

Thursday 29 May – 5pm-7om: Public Lecture by Professor Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia) and Chase Joynt (Chicago) ‘ Biopolitics Under the Skin: Relating Cancer Narratives – An Archive of the ‘Talking Dead’?’

Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester. Followed by wine reception at Kro.

This talk situates the Cancer’s Margins project (www.lgbtcancer.ca) and its preliminary findings in an overview of feminist, postcolonial, and queer biopolitical scholarship. concerning anatomy, pathographies, embodiment, chronicity and new analytic modes of technomaterialism that have foregrounded and articulated complex and discontinuous assemblages that twist, warp and reimagine modernity’s bedrock binaries, including ‘alive<>dead’, ‘real <>fiction’, ‘subject<>object’, ‘now<>then’ and so on. This lecture will engage with the opportunity, and perhaps, the obligation, to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when a biopolitics of embodied humanism was organized in a relation of explicit politicization.

The Sexuality Summer School is sponsored this year by the Faculty of Humanities; Cornerhouse; Contact; Manchester Pride; Screen; Science, Stroke, Art 2014; and SEXGEN.